Time to say “Thank You” – using Canva templates

Lets be open – too often we forget to say “Thank You” to those, who support our work. But using social media and some good looking Canva templates this is quick and easy. Canva not only is a great tool, the team from Canva also provides great tutorials and templates. Ideal to achieve best results – even as a beginner! In this SMiLE blog post we show you …

Step 1: Select the template

Visit Canva’s template page and choose the template you like. “Thank You” is one of the subcategories available, so lets choose that:

QR codes are very convenient, when it comes to drawing attention from your audience or directing people to your fund-raiser page. The SMiLE team used this very successfully during and after LCI international convention 2015 in Honolulu by making a QR code part of our famous SMiLE Pin.

Part 1 of this article series introduced an iOS based App – Qrafter Pro – for reading and creating QR codes.

Part 2 of this article series introduced an Android based App – QR Droid – for reading and creating QR codes.

Part 3 of this article series talked about utilizing built-in facebook QR-codes for events.

Now it is time to talk about creating QR codes online and with embedded logo!

Part 4: QR codes created Online

Despite the fact, that the smartphone and tablet apps introduced in previous posts are very feature rich, there are still lots of situations, where using an online service is the most efficient way to go. This is especially true when using your desktop PC while working on your various sites. As you can imagine, there are tons of websites on the internet offering QR code generation service. SMiLE has picked one of these for you, which give you again an easy start plus offering a good set of features and “talks” various languages (English, German and Spanish as of 02/2016).

Of course you might try other services as well, but please keep in mind:
When using online services, you always should consider data privacy and security of your devices! Applying common sense already helps to “judge” when exploring an online service. Too much advertising, flashy pop-up screens, etc. might be one indicator. Another thing to be aware of – does the website make it clear enough, which of it’s services might be paid-services?

Although SMiLE can not make any guarantees for the web service we introduce in this article, at least we can cornfirm that during the usage of it the last months we have not come across any of these issues and are quite pleased with the results.

Introducing QR code monkey web service

The web service introduced in this blog post is “QR code monkey“. It is well suited for beginners as well as advanced users. Amongst other things it offers:

a good feature set, including some fancy stuff to create attracting QR codes

a reasonable clean interface considering the feature set

no advertising (as of 01/2016)

multi-language user interface (English, German, Spanish)

Good “on-page” explanation of the steps to take for a QR code

supporting various output formats (besides png: svg, pdf & eps)

supporting different QR code resolutions

Also notable:
“QR code monkey” claims, that it does not store your entered data beyond the period of one day (e.g. when entering business card information for QR code generation)

To create a QR code for your clubs website using default settings, you simply:

Enter the URL (web address to be represented),

click on “Create QR-Code”

click on “Download png”

After that, we are pretty sure you digg yourself into the fancy stuff, like adding a logo or icon image to the center of the QR code 😉

QR code monkey feature set

As you can see from the screenshots provided above, there are quite some options you can choose from when using QR code monkey web service:

Various types of QR codes:

website address (URL)

business card / contact details (vCard)

location

Youtube video link

and some more …

Embedded logo

Unique is the option to embed a logo into the QR code. This can be a custom logo (your club logo) or one of the pre-made icons you can choose from. Keep in mind, that the logo graphic should not be too complex, as the QR code will have a small size in most use-cases.

QR code image resolution

Choose the resolution of the QR code to be generated wisely. In case readability is critical, use a higher resolution, but also stay away from complex embedded logos (or avoid them completely). In case the QR code gets printed large, then this might be less critical.

Using the final QR code on a web site, then typically choose a smaller resolution to receive a smaller image size.

Usage tips

As always, you need to experiment a bit to receive the ideal result. Once you are done with the QR code generation, do a “live-check” and scan the QR code with one of the smartphone apps introduced in the previous posts. This gives you some sort of “quality control” and confidence, that the information the QR code represents is correct and the QR code “works”.

Have fun and success!

SMiLE blog post series about QR codes

This article ends our current series about QR codes.

QR codes are a great tool to promote Lions activities in all sorts of ways. Let us know from time to time how you are doing and what usages you have discovered in real life.

Using the tag feature of our blog will list all QR code related posts easily (there is more than just this little series 🙂